To “elope” sounds romantic, with a dash of carnival ride—not elegant or cummerbund formal. But when dapper civil-rights attorney David Grant eloped to Kansas City with his bride, Mildred Hughes (who, during college in Chicago, was considered “one of the comeliest socialites of the South Side”), he couldn’t curb his natural, leonine regality; nor she, her movie star glamour. After returning home from K.C., they sit, love-struck, in the midst of a house party thrown by Mildred’s godmother, Sarah Gregg, the gregarious matron swimming in silk and pearls in the background. It’s rare when the facts of the moment constellate into a moment of the sublime; even rarer to capture it in a photo. But here, the most mundane of details—the sinuous curls on that silver radiator, the floral pattern on the brocade sofa, the curls in her hair, the waves in his—come together to shine with an otherworldly perfection. “Till death do us part” has come to sound hollow, but when David Grant died in 1985, after dedicating his life to the civil-rights struggle, you know whose hand he held as he left this world.
Photograph from At the Elbows of My Elders: One Family’s Journey Toward Civil Rights by Gail Milissa Grant (2008), published by the Missouri History Museum, used with permission of the author. For more information, go to mohistory.org/publications.
